I hope that Spring has sprung wherever you are reading this, and I want to take a moment to offer some updates about the journal and the festival.

The Windhover

Issue 21.1 was released during the AWP Bookfair in Washington, D.C. This issue marks a full redesign of the journal, and the first in our new printing schedule of 2 issues a year (1 in February & 1 in August).

If you haven’t yet read the issue, be sure to purchase a copy through our website, or better yet, order a subscription.

We are currently reading submissions for issue 21.2, which will be released in August. We’re looking for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as more general nonfiction. Please note that our reading period continues through April 15. Time is running out to send us your work!

Because of our new schedule, we will have a second reading period, running from August 1 through October 15.

We are excited to be bringing The Windhover to the second annual Catholic Imagination Conference at Fordham University. As the editor, I’ll be speaking with some other wonderful editors on a panel discussing faith-based journals. We’ll also have copies of 21.1 available. Here’s a link to the conference website: https://www.fordham.edu/info/25908/2017_catholic_imagination_conference

* We’re excited that issue 21.1 (featuring the new title and layout) has been sent off to print. We’ll be releasing the issue at the 50th Annual AWP Conference in Washington, D.C., February 7-10. We’ll be at #342-T, so stop by and visit us!

* This upcoming issue begins our new twice-a-year publishing schedule, with one issue released in February and one released in August. To coincide with our new publishing schedule, we now have two distinct reading periods: 1) February 1-April 15 for the August issue & 2) August 1-October 15 for the February issue.

Both affirming and unsettling, David Craig’s Pilgrim’s Gait walks us sometimes stub-toed, sometimes limping, sometimes leaping for joy across continents and centuries in this pilgrimage of poetry and prose.

In the first section, “Pilgrim’s Places,” we find ourselves with the poet and his family journeying through Europe and the United States. At Garabandal, Craig exclaims, “It was labor intensive, / this waiting for God!” (2) and even more so as the family— including a three-year-old with Downs’ chiming in with comedic alleluia’s—find they are waiting during the “wrong year” for healing. Throughout, such amusing and somber missteps eventually make for sure footing as the narrator approaches sites of “fake apparitions” (9), churches “decrepit enough to convince anyone / that what mattered most wasn’t there” (5), “God dancing, as He always does, / in feathers, in the past” (8), and—most importantly—the realization “what could any of us, finally, have traded / for what we’d been given” (4)?